Change many symbolic links at once?

Question

I have about 40 symbolic links in a directory that look like this:

lrwxr-xr-x    1 anna  staff    45B 22 Jun 11:20 menu-bg-left.jpg -> ../../../../../hg/www/images/menu-bg-left.jpg
lrwxr-xr-x    1 anna  staff    46B 22 Jun 11:20 menu-bg-right.jpg -> ../../../../../hg/www/images/menu-bg-right.jpg

I would like to change them all to a different directory:

lrwxr-xr-x    1 anna  staff    45B 22 Jun 11:20 menu-bg-left.jpg -> ../../../../../code-local/www/images/menu-bg-left.jpg
lrwxr-xr-x    1 anna  staff    46B 22 Jun 11:20 menu-bg-right.jpg -> ../../../../../code-local/www/images/menu-bg-right.jpg

For various reasons I can't just symlink the hg directory to the code-local directory, I need to change the links themselves.

Can I shell script this somehow?

Answer 1

You change dir to the directory where you want your sym-links to be placed. Then you read all your images from the source directory in a for loop. With every run of the loop a sym-link is created.

Note: I couldn't test the script but should be fine. Check it first or someone can review it first

#!/bin/bash
cd /to/directory/where/symlinks/should/be
for file in ls /to/directory/where/symlinks/should/be
do
   rm $file
   ln -s /where/your/image/files/are/$file $file
done

Answer 2

You can use a combination of readlink and shell, something like:

#!/bin/sh
cd /to/directory/where/symlinks/should/be
for i in * ; do
    if [ -h $i ]; then
        NEWTARGET=`readlink $i | sed 's,old/path/to/files,new/path/to/files,'`
        rm -f $i
        ln -s $NEWTARGET $i
    fi
done